The Wolverine: Covering University of Michigan Football and Sports
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1508023
OCTOBER 2023 ❱ THE WOLVERINE 21 the senior administrators, the faculty and athletic reps are working hard to integrate them into the Big Ten. "We're trying to make certain that our student-athletes and the impact of this on them is minimized as best we can for all 18 institutions — as far as the travel. "However, people need to understand that we play a national schedule in all of our sports. That means our student- athletes are traveling across the country. "The women's soccer program went out to USC to play them in a nonconfer- ence game. This may be some additional travel, but it's not unlike our teams to travel to the West Coast, to travel south and play games out of conference. We have done it quite a bit against the Pac-12 over the years. "In addition, we have a tremendous fan base on the West Coast. We have a lot of great alums on the West Coast. I'm looking forward to our teams go- ing out there and competing more on a regular basis. "This year, for example, men's basket- ball is playing Oregon in a nonconfer- ence game. We have these things that we already do. This may add some to that, but it's consistent with some of what we already do in the nonconference." TW: There has been mention of some sort of cre- ative scheduling to mitigate some of the travel. Is there anything to that? WM: " Co u l d b e . We 're wo rk i n g through it now. Nothing is finalized at this point. But we also have sports in the current Big Ten that don't play a round robin, that don't play everybody. "We have a tournament in certain sports. Men's and women's golf comes to mind. Men's and women's track comes to mind, where not everybody is going up against everybody. It's the championship, or the tournament, where everybody goes to play, or the top eight or top 10 teams go and then play for a Big Ten championship. "Where and how those are scheduled remains to be seen. But there's already that creativity within the Big Ten. It's not going to be new to our teams to not play everybody, or this sense of a cham- pionship being a one-game competi- tion like in football or a tournament like Coach Jim Harbaugh and the football team celebrated their second consecutive Big Ten Championship Game victory last December. PHOTO BY LON HORWEDEL